


Sucker

by PrinceofKawaii



Category: Homestuck
Genre: A little bit of everything, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Bro-centric, F/M, Gen, Lots of Angst, Mentions of alcohol and drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-12
Updated: 2013-01-12
Packaged: 2017-11-25 05:09:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/635449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrinceofKawaii/pseuds/PrinceofKawaii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Broderick Strider's life has been one wrong turn after another. But when he falls for an older woman, things take a turn for the better. And when a baby shows up on his doorstep that he knows is his, his life gets a hell of a lot more complicated.</p><p>Because how do you raise a child when you're barely out of being one, yourself?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sucker

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wwhatevver (kenmiaou)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenmiaou/gifts).



There were many things that Broderick Strider wasn't; and one of those things was a sucker.

Unless Roxanne Lalonde was involved.

\-----

You met her at a party when you were fifteen years old. She was six years older than you and provided a lot of the booze for these parties. She was the oldest out of the group of your friends and the last one you met, and the moment your buddy elbowed you in the side and pointed at her, you knew you must've been seeing things, because no one on Earth could be as beautiful as she was.

At that point in time, her hair was down to her shoulders, falling in messy half-curls around her shoulders. She was wearing a pink chaffon evening gown, the fabric flowing like water around long legs. She wasn't curvaceous, but she was tall and pale-skinned, hair naturally platinum blonde.

The moment you locked eyes with that woman, you were in love with her, and you weren't even going to deny it. 

A boozehound she was, but she was brilliant to boot. Sharp-witted with a bell-like laugh and words that could cut even you down with a deadly precision, a blade through your heart and you were gone. Laid on the floor beneath this woman's shiny blade slick with the blood of your undeniable attraction to her, and she knew. She knew and she played you for it.

At first, anyway.

After the first few meetings, you began to have enough of yourself in tattered pieces around this life-like Aphrodite that you fought back, and the delight that shone in her bright, humor-filled magenta eyes was so worth it, as was the mischief. The two of you together was like no one could ever dream, conversation going back and forth at speeds only matched by the world's greatest debate masters. Once she happened upon one of your kinks, nothing was safe. No topic went unbroached by the Strider-Lalonde team, and no one got out alive. Bits and pieces of yourselves strewn out and attached to homemade crucifixes as you took turns pecking at each other with the sharpest words you could imagine.

And God, did you love that woman more than ever.

The first time you had sex with her, it was your sixteenth birthday, and you snuck her into the group home you were staying in and talked all night until she teased you. Gave you the best birthday gift you ever could have asked for. She turned you into a man that night - her twenty-two the next day, and you still a manchild, grown up too fast in a harsh world.

You became her favorite plaything - eager to please the beautiful, older woman that had captured your heart, and she played on that. The banter never ceased, either. Not even in bed.

"Even **I** could use my tongue better than that, and I don't intend to have my face buried in pussy, Strider!"

"Maybe you should. You'd feel right at home, you cunt."

Audience laughs. Applauds. Everyone feels good about themselves and it starts all over again.

Four months into your thing you have with her, she tells you she's moving to New York. Your goodbye is fucking her until she screams your name in some sleazy hotel down the road. You don't ever tell her how you felt about her, because she knows and you know she knows. Regardless, you talk a lot on the phone. When she's there, she tells you she's pregnant and you can't help but feel bad for the sorry sap who fathered her children.

You two become the best of friends, and you vaguely wonder about the time you wanted more from her when you don't quite need any more, but you'd rather not have less. In a world where it's all give and take, you're stuck in the shitty median, not sure where you're going with your life.

Half-way through your seventeenth year on the planet, you open the door of your shitty group home and find a baby on the porch. You feel like you've been sucker-punched when you crouch down next to the child. He blinks up at you with these beautiful blood-red eyes, and you know then that those red eyes and that platinum hair and those surprisingly strong hands...

That little and terrifyingly fragile being was yours. You don't know how you figured it out,  but from the first moment that you saw Dave Strider, he was your slutty ass' child and now everything that you ever knew about the world was crashing down around you. You weren't responsible for your own person. You hadn't finished high school yet, and you drank and smoked and did drugs and were generally the worst kind of human being out there. You couldn't take care of this baby.

But if he was yours, then you were damn well gonna try.

Every scrap of cash you made after that was saved so you could find yourselves a home. It was hard to make money when you had a baby to take care of, and the nights were long and sleepless because you didn't trust anyone you lived with to look after a child. They were all as stupid and ignorant as you.

Every free moment between earning cash and taking care of Dave were thrown toward dealing with CPS and the government. You were going to earn the right to take this child as your own and you were going to not rest until it was over and he was yours. You got him when he was about six months old (put his birthday as yours to make it easier on yourself and finally give you something to celebrate) and the fight didn't end until almost a year later.

Your dedication was admired, your stupidity loathed. How could someone as young as you with a past like yours and an interest in men be fit to be a father? You looked them all in the eye and said: "Fine, I'll be his brother, then, if I'm unfit to be his father." That's how it all started.

You began taking on more and more jobs to provide for him, the government nice enough to provide daycare while you were trying to get on your feet. You hardly slept, hardly ate. Every waking moment was working until your fingers bled and your feet blistered, and then you had to do it all over again, because heaven forbid that being a drop out and a father was easy.

Every ounce of effort was all for rent and food so your little one could live his life in relative comfort. You wanted him to be able to experience the things you never got to experience in life because you were going to be the best parent/brother/guardian you could bring yourself to be. You'd never had a family, so you didn't know a lot of the things you should have known, but it worked. It worked and he gave you something to live for. Made you quit a lot of the drugs you were doing, cut back drinking, improve your health as best you could while being a walking zombie.

You'd sleep with him when he was young; curl up on the bed with your little brother and tuck him to your chest as you let his even breathing lull you to sleep.

Him calling you "daddy" in the beginning almost made you want to cry because you weren't good enough to be a father. Even legally, the paperwork lists you as his brother, because that's how it had to be. Eventually he catches on and calls you Bro which is cool because that you can deal with. It's partially your name and makes your life so much easier and makes the pain dull to a faint ache.

You and Roxy would talk on the phone, sharing baby stories when you were both exhausted and the kids were in bed. She'd tell you about her daughter Rosalie that was Dave's age, and you felt so contented during those moments. Like you could just exist and be happy without the weight of the world resting on your too-young shoulders.

You had to square money from every paycheck away to afford turn tables so you could try to get a side job being a Disc Jockey at the local clubs. Anything, **anything** to keep you two floating above par for the month, even if it meant less sleep and less food than before.

Occasionally you would collapse, and Dave would curl up with you when you did, making sure you kept breathing. You hated that he wasn't old enough to read a couple sentences in a book, but he already knew to check for a pulse when you went down. It made you sick.

Sometimes you cried while you curled around his sleeping body and you wondered how you kept going, but then you felt him stir and wipe your cheeks and kiss your nose and you knew that he was the reason behind everything and while it all wasn't suddenly okay, you found a little bit of that spark again.

When Dave was eight years old, you were twenty-five and you'd discovered the joys of managing your own websites. One of them practically exploded overnight, though, and though you weren't proud of the methods it took to **make** money, you were doing it. You were finally able to relax and the feeling makes you so fucking giddy that you pick Dave up and spin him around, giving him the biggest, most uncool hug you can manage and tell him that everything's going to be okay. The smile he gave you was matched only by one other time. His ninth birthday.

For his ninth birthday, you buy him a set of turntables, and you're amazed by how quickly he catches on. It's apparent that while you've got a flair for the lyrics behind a masterpiece, Dave's more focused on the beat behind them, everything nearly perfectly timed like he was born to do something like this with his life.

Those were pretty much the last times you'd ever get to see such raw, unabashed emotion on your brother's face.

Sometime just after his ninth birthday, Roxy came back with her daughter. You were excited to see them and Dave commented on how uncool it was for you to be grinning like an idiot as you waited for them in the airport. It was wild, seeing them in the flesh, and you couldn't help but realize that Rosalie (Rose, she insisted on being called) looked as beautiful as Roxy. But you couldn't shake the feeling that her and Dave looked too similar, or that she had your thin lips compared to Roxy's full ones - 

The smile fades, and something clenches at your heart that you ignore. When you come to, Rose and Dave are snarking at each other like Roxy and you used to, and you give your old flame a smirk that she returns. The trip to their new apartment in your ratty truck was full of the sounds of Strider-Lalonde snark, and it couldn't have been any better at all.

When they're gone, Dave insists that he hates both of them, but you know better.

Ten years old and in fifth grade brought him John Egbert. The two kids couldn't be more different from each other, but somehow they meshed like puzzle pieces from completely different puzzles that came together to form the same picture anyway. He taught Dave to be less serious and more silly. Taught your little brother to live a little and be a kid where he'd almost forgotten how to be one. They went to the same school, and despite how unironically dorky the buck-toothed kid was, he was pretty damn ballsy, you had to admit.

He called you Mr. Strider (which you hated to be called) and mocked your shades (which you had since before Kamina was cool, thanks) and somehow that made you like him more. Often times Dave would stick up for you, but others he'd be trying to hide a laugh, an amused snort the only thing coming out of him.

With John came Jade. She was his cousin from Hawaii, and Dave talked to her on the internet a lot. They, too, became very good friends. Occasionally you'd catch Dave smiling as he talked to her, and it made you feel like you maybe didn't fuck up as badly as you thought you had.

Made you feel like maybe there was still a human part of him left. A part that didn't try to emulate you to the point of being almost identcal...

And identically emotionless. You never intended to end up that way, it just sort of happened because you were so focused on hiding your troubles from the world, and it just sort of stuck even after it was unnecessary.

\-----

Thirteen came and went, and with it some of the more interesting moments of your lives. John told your brother to grow some balls and be his own person and gave your baby brother his own pair of shades. They were ironic as fuck, and while it stung that Dave realized he didn't need you as much anymore, you continued to deal with it because you were realizing something.

Striders didn't plow through life; they skirted through it. Went with the flow. You knew this because you realized you were starting to get older. Hell, you were thirty now, and it was beginning to show. You were gaining your first wrinkles - the beginnings of something in between a frown and laugh line. Something uniquely you, but tired all the same.

Roxy's marriage to Mr. Egbert went smoothly too, and it didn't bother you nearly as much as it should have. She was happy, they were happy, and that's how the world turned. When the kiss came, you wolf whistled at the two of them in your black suit with your orange dress shirt, standing next to Roxy as her Maid of Honor, Dave next to you but decked out in red, instead. The wedding couldn't have been more perfect.

Dave was beginning to hit puberty, and life for a single parent was hard and nobody understood. Between running your puppet empire, DJing, doing other odd jobs people needed you to do, and running your own home, you were also raising a thirteen year old boy. That meant explaining life's mysteries to the kid that he hadn't figured out yet and having to change his bed sheets more often than not. 

It was getting harder to bullshit your way out of why you stayed out so late when you DJ. Dave was smart, there was no doubt about that, but often times he was trying to play the hero and yet you had to sit next to him while he was delirious with fever, a cold cloth on his forehead while he whimpered your name pathetically in his sleep.

There were a few hiccups in his development, and times when he was a little uncoordinated so you had to cut a strife session short. Times when acne was a problem, and his voice cracked a little too noticably and caused his pale skin to light up when you teased him about it.

But, despite every single one of your hardships, you can't help but be proud of your accomplishments, because of out everything came Dave, and he turned out pretty okay for being raised by a single guy that fucked up in every aspect of his life before he came along. Sometimes you find yourself wishing he was younger so you could curl around him to sleep instead of crashing on the futon every night. Filling your bed with strangers never helped the matter, and you were almost scared to know how far he'd go to emulate you. Which parts of you would remain untouched by him by the end of it all?

Would he grow up like you?

God, you really fucking hoped he wouldn't.


End file.
